Credit & Debt Markets Research Project

One of the engines of corporate and global growth is the efficient functioning and dynamic nature of our world’s credit and debt markets. The NYU Salomon Center has identified these markets as one of our key focus areas for committed and state-of-the-art research and dissemination of information and analytics. Our objective is to invite the University’s scholars, indeed the world’s experts, to come together in a series of research endeavors as well as specialized symposia and larger conferences to explore the many complex dimensions of financings, investment allocations, regulatory considerations and flow of capital involving global fixed income and credit markets. We plan to assemble an important set of databases to support our research and to convene relevant and important conferences on a regular basis. Some of these databases, e.g., the Altman-Kuehne Defaulted Bond and Loan Indexes are available to interested researchers and analysts. Others can be purchased from the Salomon Center (bkarlin@stern.nyu.edu). The research faculty at the Stern School of Business, and particularly its world class Finance Area, is uniquely qualified to lead these efforts, and we invite practitioners as well as academic scholars to join us in our endeavors.

New From the Credit and Debt Markets Research Program
The Credit and Debt Markets Research Program of the NYU Salomon Center will initiate an “Executive Summary” Blog on “Current Conditions & Outlook in the High-Yield Bond and Distressed Debt Markets” authored by Professor Edward Altman and Ms. Brenda Kuehne. This blog will comment on the past quarter’s performance of Defaults and Returns in the High-Yield and Distressed Debt Markets, as well as present our forecasts (see the First-Quarter 2015’s Blog at the link above or at the left). For those interested in our full reports on these markets, as well as our monthly Index of Returns on Defaulted Bonds and Bank Loans, please click here to retrieve an Annual Subscription form. For more details on our Indexes and Reports, see the Index descriptions by following the link to the left. Additionally, other NYU Stern faculty will also be adding periodic blogs commenting on various aspects of the Credit and Debt Markets, including corporate, consumer, sovereign and derivative markets. We would appreciate any comments on this new addition to our Research and Publication program.

Salomon Center High-Yield Corporate Bond Default Rate: Monthly Update

The Altman-Kuehne/Salomon Center Dollar-Based 12-month Moving Average Default Rate is calculated by adding the defaults in a given quarter (3 months) to the total dollar amount of defaults from the three prior quarters (nine months), and then dividing the total by the size of the high-yield market at the beginning of the quarter for which the rate is being calculated. This rate, as well as historical default rates, is published every quarter in our "Defaults and Returns in the High-Yield Bond Market" reports, available by subscription from the Salomon Center.